It’s nice and can add more personality to the notificaitons, but I also find it very visually noisey.
Will there be an option to toggle it on/off? Perhaps it this be a user preference with a site-wide default?
As an example of the noisiness, all I want to do is read the titles of the topics, but my eyes are drawn first to the colourful pictures, and then to the blue alert/bookmark icons. The third thing my eyes lock to are names in bold, and then finally I my eyes move to the titles, but I find it very hard to focus on the titles because there are three things to the left of each title which have higher visual strength.
Is it possible to try this with text on the left and visual on the right?
Here the title takes priority as I read left to right. Perhaps a locale setting would be needed for users who read right to left.